Ethereum Clocks New All-Time High Of Over $4,400 Following Altair’s Successful Activation

Ethereum (ETH) rose by over 9% to reach a new record high on Friday, days after the network underwent the Altair upgrade successfully, bringing the long-awaited ETH 2.0 one step closer to actualization.

Ethereum Makes New All-Time High

ETH, the native token of the second-largest blockchain by market cap, blasted to $4,415 in the morning hours, supplanting the previous all-time high of $4,308 set just eight days ago.

The Ethereum price has been on a roll since plummeting to sub-$2,000 in late July and is up by 145% since then. At press time, ETH is hovering at $4,358.50 with a 45% month-to-date gain now that it has entered price discovery mode.

The latest Ethereum rally comes as the Altair upgrade is deemed a success. This was the first and likely last upgrade to the Beacon chain before the network moves to a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm.

According to Ethereum core developer Jeff Coleman, Altair was implemented with a participation of 95% from node operators which has since risen past 98.7%. Those who did not update their nodes “will not lose their 32 ETH but those who are offline now are slowly reducing in balance. If they don’t fix it they will cross a threshold and be ejected,” Coleman stated.

It is believed that the success of the Altair upgrade paves the way for the Beacon Chain’s merge with the current mainnet as part of the deployment of Ethereum 2.0.

Ethereum Bulls Target Prices Above $4,500

Besides the recent Altair upgrade, Ethereum is also benefiting from the August London hard fork which introduced a deflationary mechanism. Instead of paying fees to the miners for validating transactions on the Ethereum network, users now pay a base fee which is immediately burned — basically removed completely from circulation. Since going live, the upgrade has burned approximately 668,340 ETH, marking more than 50% of the new coins distributed over the same time.

Moreover, Ether is also basking in the huge success of the decentralized finance (DeFi) and nonfungible token (NFT) markets.

In the meantime, Ethereum traders appear to be clamoring for the continuation of the bull rally. More than $1.25 billion in ETH options are expected to expire today, per data from statistics resource Bybt. 55% of the bets placed by the bulls peg the price of the asset at above $4,500 before the October 29 deadline.

If Ethereum happens to rally past $4,500, it will be a new lifetime high for the crypto coin that has been breaking record after record throughout the year.